Rocket
Scientists Regulating People's
Relations with their Posterity

The Peoples of China were forced to undergo the cruelties of the One Child
Policy because of the subordination of the social and biological sciences to
technicians of the hard sciences, Aeronautical Engineers - Rocket Scientsts.

Treating human beings with souls as if they were machines

"For more than a century, the Chinese have used the word 'science' to
refer not just to the study of the natural world but also to a way of thinking
that is supposed to be rational, objective, and modern. In a nation disillusioned
by Mao's utopian fantasies, [Deng Xiaoping's] emphasis on science as the party's
new touchstone was a political masterstroke. But as anthropologist Susan
Greenhalgh has
shown, the leadership's blind faith in science led it to adopt an extreme solution
to a [perceived] problem that … could
have been managed in other ways. At the center of the process was a group of
eminent rocket scientists, men who had been sheltered from Mao's campaigns,
who had access to computers and international journals, and who were supremely
confident in their own abilities. Chief among them was the cyberneticist Song
Jian, who
later served as minister of science and technology. These men viewed the population
as a machine to be fine-tuned by engineers like themselves, not a society of
humans with rights, values, and preferences. In 1979, they made the mistake
of accepting as mainstream science the most alarmist theories of overpopulation
and ecological crisis then circulating in the West. They used weak data, plugged
them into formulas adapted from their missile optimization work, and created
population models and forecasts that gave the illusion of fact. Then, over
the objections of other scholars, they used these 'scientific' results to persuade
the leadership that China faced a grave crisis and that immediate implementation
of a one-child program was the 'only way' to avoid environmental disaster and
meet Deng's economic goals." - Philip P. Pan, Out
of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, pp. 302-303.